| "Perspective" is often considered to be among the world-defining possessions of an individual. In fact, the unique vantage point is a cornerstone of liberal subjectivity and a defining feature of the rights of the individual, especially in the case of consumer culture. In the following, Michael Gardiner maps the idea of "The Enlightenment" onto contemporary optical innovations, pointing out the ways in which the democratic value of the individual viewpoint is mediated through the common lens of vision technologies. The result is a high-stakes struggle over the perception of "reality" and, ultimately, the meaning of knowledge. | |
Endless Enlightenment: Eye-Operated Technology and the Political Economy of VisionMichael Gardiner
I. Enlightenment and Vision
<1> Despite a residual popular temptation to see the "posts" of cultural analysis as signs of temporal closure, the logic of global visual media is strengthening, not weakening, metaphors of visibility which remain intact from the Enlightenment. Here I describe a stand-off between post-Enlightenment critiques (as in some sectors of Cultural Studies) and a narrow power base which is defined by producing light and managing the very conditions of visibility. For the world's most powerful state, still strongly bound to its original Enlightenment foundations, intervention into other states' sovereignty is increasingly justified by evidence from spy planes (rather than from, for example, support from international organizations such as the United Nations). At the delivery end, the view from the nose of a missile of a target rushing into close-up and then turning to white noise, is now familiar to everyone with access to major western TV channels, and has entered into the everyday vocabulary of art practice [1]. While they have trouble picking out the occasional aircraft, for us they are dinner-time viewing. Here I suggest that visual placement has grown from Enlightenment origins to become a "universal" prior principle in social stratification, and that this cannot easily be opposed using a traditional model of volition -- one person willfully oppressing another -- but that, arising from the best intentions of Enlightenment ideas of representation, it is also, paradoxically, untouchable by action because it is too democratic.
<2> Domestic public acceptance of intervention into foreign states' affairs is increasingly based on visual media communities, which are also bound to minimize any debate which gets in the way of their performance. Audiences are won by turning the most spectacular into the most newsworthy, and viewers are drawn by desires pre-read by visual technologies practiced in drawing vision. The viewing relationship takes place in what Paul Virilio has described as a "delayed time," a mixture of present and past, as the public "participates" in an event which has already happened [2]. Power/knowledge in this sense is predicated on the need to approach "real time," escaping "delayed time," the dream of reaching the decision of the form of the spectacle. Paradoxically this ability, since it is rendered universal, is never open to any one person. While delayed time creates inert subjects who cannot act, real time promises agency to those who can communicate at the speed of light, as of course no human can (and for Virilio a personless military-industrial complex is the most efficient approximation of this speed). Television audiences, the objects of manufactured light, are thus caught in a double time, fantasizing their own participation in events already delayed.
<3> But interaction with media events which already contain "a bit of the past" has almost come to have the same meaning in everyday media discourse as "democracy." The primacy of vision has so pervaded the idea of political representation that the rhetoric of good and evil seems naturally translated to the ability to emit light, or to bring to light. When George Bush reacted to the New York and Washington attacks of September 2001, his first statements confirmed that the bombers who operated "in the shadows" would not escape the "light of justice" [3]. This is not to point the finger at any one political leader, but rather to note that metaphors of visibility thoroughly structure our ideas of the rules on which a society can be based. Indeed much Cultural Studies is complicit in turning the founding spectacle of the War on Terrorism into cultural capital: there have been numerous conference panels and journal special numbers on the causes and implications of "9-11" but none, as far as I know, showcasing "8-20" -- the date of the US bombing of the Al-Shifo medical supplies factory in 1998, which is reckoned to have led to the deaths of tens of thousands of people [4]. The New York attacks were certainly the most spectacular act of war most of us are likely to have seen even on TV, provoking a mixture of horror and awe, and notoriously described by the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen as "the greatest work of art there has ever been" [5]. But the einsturzende Neubauten of "9-11" will be watched over and over, while the attack on Sudan leaves barely a recorded visual trace [6]. The difference between the two kinds of attack is that one is repeatedly seen, its victims personalized, their stories told and rendered apparently coterminous with our time. Meanwhile Euro-American use of chemical, atomic, and radioactive weapons in various parts of the world since 1945 has remained more or less invisible. The new division is less one between distinct oppressor and oppressed, but between pain in the light and pain in the dark.
<4> Light as a structuring principle of polity should not be seen as having arrived with new media: the founders of the independent United States were influenced by, or were, liberals of the Enlightenment, particularly feeling the effects of ideas from the city of Edinburgh [7]. There is also a strong case that Edinburgh political rhetoric was behind both the Declaration of Independence and the syllabuses of early US universities [8]. Composed in the year Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations criticized colonization of the Americas (1776), the Declaration is probably the world's single most widely-influential expression of Enlightenment thought [9]. Despite his support for American independence, David Hume in his 1740s political essays had advocated acceptance of the unwritten British constitution (still actually the English constitution, which had silently occupied the new British state), while being prophetically aware that its "balance" of estates would never hold if the monarchy slipped and parliament's unwritten constitution became de facto power [10]. For Edinburgh Americaphiles like Hume and Smith, the Declaration of Independence thus seemed to offer a kind of surrogate republicanism, writing down rules for representation and protecting them from abuses of Reason. Reason however in the Edinburgh Enlightenment was still prior to experience: the people are a body "out there"; visible, and abstracted from action. In Derridean terms, Enlightenment civility puts the people in a time which is future anterior (futur antérieur), in which they become an audience watching a universal narrative of progress, and are adduced to it, always after the event, as discrete subjects.
<5> For Derrida, this writing of the polity relies on a temporal slippage which allows the "people" to seem to have already existed before their coming into being in the action of signing the Declaration [11]. This slippage is a graphetic form of the Kantian movement from experience to knowledge as a "transcendental apperception" (which is surely one reason why Derrida has spent so much time interrogating Kant rather than Hume). The fact that freedom occupies a split present, of course, became a central concern of deconstruction: experience understood Enlightenment-style as an a priori structuration of the visual field sets up an authoritative future anterior time in which the self can only become the self by corresponding to standards which seem to come from before or beyond the split. What is interesting though is that deconstruction has rarely looked at the "British" Enlightenment's roots, especially driven by the post-1746 margins of the state struggling to take their place in a "global," soon imperial, order [12]. Enlightenment-based nationhood, as seen in the United Kingdom rather than, say, France [13], formalized the authority of a double time (mirrored in the priorness of Kant's programmatic "moral law") [14], eliminating volition in creating the subject self -- where volition retains the possibility of affecting an open-ended future.
<6> Hume's sceptical method also in part accounts for Enlightenment and neo-Enlightenment Scotland's advances in science and communications from James Watt to John Logie Baird (and indeed Lord Reith, founder of the BBC). In the early nineteenth century Watt's steam rail rapidly integrated Britain, allowing for each nation to be imaged within a whole, ironically aiding the economic-rationalist emptying out of his own nation even as it seemed to promise a solution to decentredness. At around the same time Glasgow patricians were suggesting, in proto-Benthamite tones, that the city undergo panoptical total surveillance, so that "the necessity of sending out emissaries to reconnoitre the conduct of the lieges would be superceded, since everything would then take place, as it were, under the eye of the Police" [15]. In November 1992, the first town in Britain to have CCTV cameras installed in its streets was the working-class Glasgow satellite town of Airdrie [16]. The scientific method of basing universalist conclusions on visual evidence also becomes disconertingly unhomely in nineteenth-century Scottish imaginings as in those of James Hogg or Robert Louis Stevenson (most obviously, the "doubling" of "Jekyll and Hyde") [17]. Similarly though, an underground stream of "post-British" twentieth-century thought) has also shown a strongly post-Enlightenment attitude to the over-adjustment in the eclipse of volition [18].
<7> In 1953-54 John Macmurray, for example, registered his amazement that Kant never allowed his insight in the Third Critique that Reason is inherently practical to propel him towards the argument that action, rather than a priori space-time, should be described as demarcating the limits of experience [19]. For Macmurray, the mentalization of space in the Humean Kant is simply an heir to the primacy of the visual in "Western" thought since Plato [20]. In Hume and Kant action is always foreclosed by a pre-existent separation of the viewer and the viewed -- who become the subject and the object -- whereas for post-Enlightenment thinkers like Macmurray and many "continental" equivalents, philosophical method must acknowledge the uncollapsable nature of space involved in knowing "about" objects. Macmurray oddly resembles and even prefigures much postcolonial writing by explaining how touch can subversively short-circuit a spatial time-lag by persons to experience "in the same time." His critique of centring knowledge on vision, for example, actually pre-dates deconstruction as a post-Enlightenment ethics aiming to undo the experiential solidity of space.
II. A Word on TV
<8> Appropriately, the context of the development of television is highly British, in the late-eighteenth century sense of Britishness. Like the earlier space-shrinking development of steam railways, television was developed in the context of an engineering tradition bolstered by Glasgow's position as the imperial "workshop of the world." This type of development had been strongly encouraged by early post-union Scottish colonialist speculation in America; from the 1730s, a huge proportion of the American tobacco trade was financed by Glasgow and Edinburgh -- a decisive factor in selling the global, mercantile, enterprise-based British union. Television retains a power still relatively under-discussed in terms of cultural politics, considering the number of viewers (or "participants") it attracts. Many of those who have described the political economy of the media most influentially have also tended to concentrate disproportionately on print; one problem with Chomsky and Herman's Manufacting Consent, a book whose importance it would be difficult to overstate, is that at times it sounds like the entire population of the world reads the New York Times [21]. Ironically, Chomsky -- routinely derided for an apparently left-wing, PC paranoia -- has at times failed to concentrate on social class or multicultural contexts enough.
<9> The class stress comes back into focus when we consider the context in which Britons watch television. Working-class British homes, due to factors including architectural custom and the difficulty of heating houses, tend to be centered on a single living-room, which constitutes the focus of family life. The TV is often left on and half-watched by people coming and going with varying degrees of consciousness of what is happening on the screen. The television's presence in this sense structures the timing of viewers' communication, with only the gaps between the more arresting moments on the screen being more filled with communication between viewers, and looks directed at one another instead of at the screen. This situation has been ingeniously parodied by the British comedy series The Royle Family, in which a family are watched from the point of view of the television, upon which everyone remains semi-fixated, only occasionally pulling sideways [22]. The context of being watched at the same time as watching neatly ironizes assumptions about volition -- that we remain in control of choices over what we watch, and that we occupy "real time" in our relationship with TV. It reminds us that TV is also surveillant, marking out the timing of communication and thus of subjectivity. Even before "interactive TV," TV was already interactive, in the sense that it could interpellate subjects to be picked out and separated. Moreover retinal scan technology can already identify individuals, and there is also already an economy of "dataveillance," the subjectification of individuals in terms of their presence online and tailoring data to them, and of "trailing" persons, locating them according to their consumption [23].
<10> Again this visual economy has roots in newly-British and newly-imperial Scotland. For one thing, the Enlightenment set up a "spatial" division between spoken and written language; its rapid adjustment to London-Oxbridge modes ironically stands behind the first standards of "English Literature" [24]. Secondly, since Scotland remains more attached to the idea of welfare state (as is obvious in almost every clash between Edinburgh and Westminster), it has a much higher proportion of council housing, as opposed to private housing, in comparison with England. Council housing is of a standardized size; more TV is watched in more single living rooms in more standardized space. The nation's population has in general been less interested that has Britain as a whole in the dream of owning a house, despite the attempts of Margaret Thatcher to create a generation of working-class Conservative voters by selling council houses at bargain rates. In Marabou Stork Nightmares (1996), Irvine Welsh lampoons the aspiring working-class Tory homeowner by having the Edinburgh council scheme-dweller Roy Strang recognize the absurdity of the social aspirations of his father, whose favourite record is of the speeches of Winston Chrurchill, and who fails to see how his family are living in a system-built housing scheme totally lacking infrastructure, a "concentration camp for the poor" [25]. The father, whose paternal identification with leadership would not look out of place in Wilhelm Reich, cannot see his own inability to control the effects of TV on his living space [26]. He persists in his assumption that owning satellite TV makes them more individual, more in control of choice, and closer to "real time":
We were the first family in the district to have all the key consumer goods as they came onto the market: colour television, video recorder, and eventually satellite dish. Dad thought that they made us different from the rest of the families in the scheme, a cut above the others. Middle-class, he often said.
All they did was define us as prototype schemies. [27]
<11> At stake in this apparently innocent and comic episode (the satellite dishes stick out of the blocks like Roy's ears) is the working-class consumption of an increasingly wide choice of vision, a choice that separates them from other families and draws them closer to the terminal. The father fails to realise that his "middle-class" consumer desires have already been accounted for, and this context is returned to the city where the universal civilizing narrative for global export was perfected, Edinburgh. Television's sliding of volition under a temporality controlled by differential access to visual culture comes even more into focus if we posit, as I do below, the idea that in the near future viewers may be able to entirely "control" their choice of image by having their own vision watched as it tracks the most spectacular sections of a bank of visual data.
III. Vision Machines
<12> Eye-operated media can short-circuit seeing and wanting, bypassing volition in the sense of making a "conscious" move to change channel. It already exists as a discrete technology: the Virginia company LC Technologies for example sells an "eyegaze" system which, as the name suggests, follows the movement of the eye as a substitute for keypad input. In the Eyegaze system eye activity is watched -- "a 3-dimensional location of the eyeball within the camera field of view" -- by a near-inrfared 60Hz pulse which constantly locates gaze direction by relating pupil and cornea, using a method known as pupil-center-corneal-reflection (PCCR) method [28]. Software calculates where the "subject" (a highly symptomatic term) is looking at any one time by illumination of the eye by a small LED diode, "generat[ing]the corneal reflection and caus[ing] the bright pupil effect, which enhances the camera's image of the pupil" [29].
<13> Where the typewriter keyboard was an inspiration to the increasingly sightless Nietzsche as he became unable to write longhand [30], eye-operated media technology has also developed together with a rhetoric of fully enabling the body, in this case of those with ALS, which prevents the use of keyboards. Eyegaze literature nevertheless also suggests that "[t]here are many situations in human factors research when it is desirable to know where a person is looking. The system is a tool for measuring, recording, playing back, and analyzing what a person is doing with his eyes" [31]. By identifying the "gazepoint" 60 times per second, Eyegaze creates a picture of where the subject's gaze is concentrated; any linked technology would be able to act upon this information by streaming certain types of information to certain parts of the interface -- indeed this would be made necessary and automatic by a duty to maximize profit for shareholders [32].
<14> Large corporations like Hitachi have also long been experimenting with interfaces allowing remote bodily control. Hitachi's Den no shin is a generic name for a communications system which has eye control as one optional form, apparently developed in dialogue with customer demand [33]. Den no shin is a highly poetic phrase which is not easy to translate, but might be rendered as "heart of the message"; its interfaces range from entirely mouse-controlled for the elderly and computer beginners to an extraordinary system for those with extreme forms of ALS, which measures movements of blood in the brain [34]. Since the beginning of research in 1994 and launching in 1997, Den no shin has developed to allow online interface. Its avowed aim is to return to its users the will to live (ikigai), by allowing them, firstly, to express their demands, secondly, remote control of the technology around them, and thirdly, access to the internet [35]. This is both a simplification and a totalization of human participation in communications technology, and measurement of the human gaze is one of its key interfaces. The technology is, as might be imagined, highly personalized in a way that is unimaginable in most computer interfaces. If extended beyond ALS patients and the elderly, it has a perpetual head start in individuating each user, separating at the same time as connecting. This individuation is perhaps not surprising in a society which has enthusiastically adopted American-Enlightenment ideas of political representation: at the time of finishing this paper, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has just taken time off a busy schedule of drumming up support for the American military to preside over the three-city opening (Tokyo-Osaka-Nagoya) of a major terrestrial digital network, leading to the total phase-out of analog by 2011 and the potential for widespread "interactive programs" [36].
<15> Eye-controlled technology, if converted into a media feedback loop, thus closely resembles what Paul Virilio described in his 1994 book as a "vision machine," a machine which automates visual perception [37]. In Virilio's description, the real-time image renders obsolete any idea of a discrete object in a total dissimulation. Unlike Jean Baudrillard, who has at times downplayed the violence of the temporal split, Virilio stresses that the vision machine's project is domination, producing entertainment merely as a technological offshoot [38]. In my model of eye-controlled technology, this "dominance" cannot be understood in terms of unilateral force. It becomes total by rationalizing desires -- not by refusing them, but by satisfying them. If the vision machine causes human movement to disappear from the story, the primacy of the spatial frequency of matter -- the speed at which objects such as weapons move -- has for Virilio an ideal at the speed of light, the maximum speed at which information can be passed. The speed of light is read as presence.
<16> Thus when the vision machine short-circuits volition, as Virilio points out using precisely the same terms as Macmurray, seeing becomes "an act that precedes action." This is the problematic of basing knowledge on vision: choice is always underwritten by a prior structuration, a universalized narrative of personal development of which Edinburgh was once the world's chief exporter. Following paths of information already identified with the self becomes unavoidable, and decisions become pre-decided. The viewer/participant must constantly try, and fail, to close the time-lag, forever reconstituting herself as a participant in civil society. With "choice" temporally split but the access to information almost total, the gap between taking information and realizing that the information is wanted, becomes a post-spatial form of colonial time-lag. Certainly the "boundary" of this temporal split is partially permeable, as are class boundaries -- those "far away" from the speed of light can occasionally get "close" to it -- but this is precisely what makes it hard to break down as ideology. Manipulation of information online in search of the contemporary supplants human value even as it individuates people into subjects. Protagonists are repeatedly placed at the centre of all world communication -- space has closed down to "real time" which must be individually chased -- and are increasingly unable to communicate with one another. People's talk across a living room becomes a less legitimate marker of civility than communication mediated by technology able to prioritize more quickly than the human mind. Thus the doubleness of the term "society," which in Enlightenment Edinburgh meant both an ideal of universal sympathy and a private club (but had little to do with the state, which had recently moved to London).
<17> So although metaphors of participation in society would be retained or even increased with large-scale interactive eye-operated technology, their interfaces would at the same time close down to the individual, discrete terminal. Measured by Enlightenment standards, this is a perfectly representative democracy, answering individual wants in a time always tending towards ideal simultaneity. Public space paradoxically sheds its dependency on space, and all communication is mediated and rendered an echo of a real event, an echo which is part present and part past, or "delayed time." Delayed time is always almost real time, but never quite, and power inheres in how much users can approach (or in an oddly Platonic sense, "partake of") the speed of light. The corporate activity which is then logical, and in the shareholder-friendly US legally required, is to automatically increase certain images when reading that they have attracted a certain demand (in a sense of "demand" that would make Adam Smith turn in his grave). This can be read via an eye scan of the type of Eyegaze or Den no Shin. The resultant feedback loop is still "democratic" since it answers demand in the sense of response. People's knowledge of this demand however is absorbed into "delayed time"; by the time they notice it, it has already been answered. The automated supply and demand circuit based on vision is always much nearer the speed of light than is human reaction as a whole process, bogged down as it is by nerves and flesh. So, to relate this back to the sitting room, visual "interruptions" to face-to-face communication have become irresistible, and tend to spread out and join up to form the content of communication. This technology's class stratification has less to do with identifiable agents oppressing other identifiable agents, than with Enlightenment ideals of universal suffrage via universal surveillance. Civility is a constant chosen by a people who never choose to choose it, their every deviant wish being answered in the affirmative, allowing for perpetual adjustment of the whole.
<18> This continuous compulsion to "choose" the most popular of many visual options is already coming to be seen as democracy itself. As Virilio presaged, each recent Anglo-American attack on foreign territories has seemed to provide an increasingly clear example; in the Afghanistan campaign all the major American visual media very rapidly and almost automatically began to self-censor with a univocality beyond the descriptions of even the pre-2001 Chomsky. The problem for oppression-seeking critics is that media not only used accurate information, it also put the viewer "in charge of" plentiful sources, increasingly so with each military campaign. Censorship is now rarely imposed, there being no need. Via the logic of spectacularizing whatever is already familiar, victims on the good side were viewed and personalized, while those on the evil side failed to arouse great audience interest. In the Iraqi campaign, each US casualty caused a soul-searching over justifications, while unknown times more Iraqis died unseen. Of course there are many precedents for this popular point of view, which can perhaps be dated back to 1945, and that most literal moment of enlightenment -- the speed of light as pure remote violence -- after which film of the atomic bombings was viewed by those on the bombing side long before those on the bombed. This moment also saw the emergence of first modern "client state," one which would stress the need throughout its popular culture to "catch up" to the US, its TV frequently featuring news of US Major League baseball play as a top story, before (or instead of) news from the rest of the world. TV now no longer has to be told that spectacularizing is in its own interest, and during the Afghanistan campaign the Pentagon stated that it was proud of the media's instinct to direct its gaze. Viewers interested in non-American casualties had to go and seek out information, yet, vitally, they also had to get beyond having their attention tugged back as participants by apparently more real-time coverage "as it happens" by networks whose legal duty was to keep them tuned in.
<19> Thus the subject-making process creates closed circuits of identity in visual space: each viewer/ participant has total power over a world from which she is perfectly separated, joined only by media which have taken over the sign of the public by representing no-one at all. This object-subject division is often rightly seen as a product of imperialism; it also has origins however in the encyclopedic knowledge-placing tendencies of the newly-British Edinburgh of the 1750s and 60s, an environment which also saw major codifications in the study of sociology, anthropology, and "English Literature." In Enlightenment Edinburgh, civility gained by the individual codification of knowledge was a guarantor of civic identity; it was also the response of a desperate nation which had given up sovereignty and needed globalization. Globalization in its Anglophone form began as a catch-up movement trying to overcome decenteredness. Technocracy aimed to overcome geographical marginality by making claims on the speed of light - for evidence of which we only need to watch an episode of the original Star Trek and note who is "beaming up" crew members.
IV. Endless Enlightenment
<20> In eye-operated media then, unlike the TV generation, each subject is correct in thinking that she has the freedom to make choices, develop, and become more powerful. Yet at the same time, the overlaps between persons, community, and politics, disappear. By becoming universal, consensus is, ironically, not in the interest of anyone; its logic of idealized visual presence has shaken free from older ideas of power and personal influence, and we struggle in vain to find direct impositions. Rather the overall systematicity seems to come from beyond human space altogether, requiring resistances which only work insofar as they also avoid being subjectively fixed. It is in this sense that Virilio suggests that each viewpoint relative to contemporary media is split into the "animate" and the "inanimate" -- the latter production by technology for technology, which has bypassed human volition altogether. As a general possibility this was recognized by Marshall McLuhan about four decades ago. Electricity, he argued in Understanding Media, destroys sequentiality by rendering communications instant - and for "instant," we can read, quicker than the articulation of volition. For McLuhan, TV is more engaging (more "cool") than reading, since the viewer has to add to an imperfect image to make it whole [39]. Thus similarly hypertext is glossed by Paul Levinson in his digital reading of McLuhan as a "movement of writing towards the light"; Levinson nevertheless sees all online voting as tending to justice, and all information flow as tending to "truth" [40]. Levinson notes that TV was already "light through" in the way that hypertext would become, partaking more of futurity than do "light-on" technologies -- though again there is no suggestion here that TV's tendency to soak up activeness is also one of its problems, despite admitting that TV "viewers develop an insatiable need to reach out and touch someone, to get in touch" [41]. Somewhat anticipating Virilio -- albeit with a very different politics -- McLuhan also posited the theoretical limit of the passage of information as the speed of light:
The instance of the electric light may prove illuminating in this connection. The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message, as it were, unless it is used to spell out some verbal ad or name. This fact, characteristic of all media, means that the "content" of any medium is always another medium. [42]
The idea of media endlessly embedded within other media which are finally without "content" in the traditional sense certainly appalls Virilio, who frequently comes close to arguing that figuration indicates sympathy, while abstraction indicates genocide. Although the tendency towards the speed of light is for McLuhan "characteristic of all media" - media always tending to integrate and become interactive - the tendency to use media purely to organize other media dramatically increases with eye-operated technology. If we conceive of a world in which we can have any information we want merely by looking at it, indeed where freedom to choose leaves us powerless not to choose whatever already has the greatest visual presence, our duty is to keep reorganizing information in an endless attempt to approach the speed of light, leaving no time to "do" anything with this information. Like Nietzsche's typewriter, the medium here has suddenly been flooded by interface, continually converting content into form, conversation into organization. Or as Gaston Bachelard was putting it almost half a century ago, "Sight sees too many things at the same time" [43]. TV already spends a lot of time talking about what is on TV; it is a short leap to a pure, contentless interface, which is both the dream and the nightmare of all democrats. Sitting rooms would be dominated by a flatter, larger, super-integrated and increasingly interactive visual interface, and would be, in McLuhan's words, "prisons without walls" [44]. Eye-controlled choice makes it perfectly possible to imagine a situation in which the participant/ viewer is caught in a subjectification-objectification loop precisely by being required to make choices - ideal democracy as the end of humanity.
<21> In eye-operated interfaces as I describe them, information from "the world" gathers until its weight becomes irresistible to the person, exploding in a violent "double time" -- trying and failing to draw participants up to light speed. Participants are left to sort out their customized lists forgetting any conversation interrupted by the blast of information. As opposed to same-space communication, participation involves a total polity, whose limits are always those of the medium. We might view this as a twenty-first century version of the sitting-room in which families only turn to one another during commercial breaks or dull sections of program - as I have done in the story reproduced here. The protagonists are repeatedly placed at the centre of all world communication -- space has closed down to the "real time" which must be chased by staying in touch with a single terminal -- yet there are increasingly unable to communicate with one another. They are crippled by an excess of choice which paradoxically short-circuits choice, and renders obsolete any kind of unmediated community. Their living-room-centered flat, built at the height of Edinburgh's fashionableness posited at about 2015, is designed as a retro version of the original system-built council blocks, an unheimlich home reproduced down to fake graffiti designed by the local council. Since the viewer/ participant in effect chooses her own lists from all the informational "weather" spread across the walls, she is also powerless to resist the gathering clouds of cross-indexed words and images, which build up to a pressure which bursts upon them with an irresistable pleasure. While the participant is making choices, her choices are "pre-known" since they are driven by the size of the visual presence of each piece of information. The British spin of this split sitting-room also reflects the Enlightenment's anxious loss of "home" (there is no Scottish Mansfield Park; nor, for that matter, is there a specifically English Mansfield Park) [45]. Neo-Enlightenment citizens no longer need to worry about marginalisation, since they are continually at the centre, but are crippled by an excess of choice which renders obsolete any kind of unmediated community.
<22> The problem is that in terms of Enlightenment ethics, this situation of totally spatial media I have described is also perfect democracy. More materially, the Enlightenment grew in part from a desire to be ideally integrated, to overcome space by controlling speed. (This point is precisely what is missed in the confusion between Britain and England which haunts even the most important of American thinkers: Chomsky routinely talks about the likes of Adam Smith in terms of a non-existent English state; there is no evidence that Said can see the difference between a British Mansfield Park and an English Mansfield Park, though the latter, not driven by the same desperate need to globalize, would scarcely have been imperialist in the same way). With totally interactive visual technologies, the problem would not be that the government was not transparent enough, but rather that it is too transparent; every political decision would demand total participation, leaving no time for random meetings or indeterminate content. Viewers would be imprisoned in an endless desire for community which also separated them into customized individuality. It is in this sense that the Enlightenment perfected by eye-operated media is "endless": the metaphors which have driven Euro-American modernity, spatial to the core, have also demanded a constant remaking of the self in subjective terms, an endless development towards separateness.
Notes
[1] Cf. Jordan Crandall, Heatseeking (Course Track), Single-Channel Video Installation, 1999-2000, discussed by Sabine Himmelsbach in eds. Thomas Y. Levin, Ursula Frohne, and Peter Weibel, CRTL [SPACE]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2002), 292-295. [^]
[2] Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine (Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 1994), chapter five. [^]
[3] Cf. Michael Gardiner, "'A Light to the World': British Devolution and Colonial Vision," Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 7.1, 2004, 145-162. [^]
[4] The number of casualties is difficult to estimate, since there has been no great public demand to count it; the plant provided 90% of the country's medicine, and its destruction left perhaps 20000 to die horribly, though unspectacularly, of treatable diseases. See e.g. Naom Chomsky, "Reply to Hitchens," The Nation 1st October 2001. [^]
[5] quoted in Paul Virilio, Ground Zero (London: Verso, 2002), 45. [^]
[6] The phrase meaning "collapsing new buildings" comes from the German avant-rock/ industrial band of the same name. Meanwhile Virilio has often complained about how much inhuman or "pitiless" modern art has come from Germany, and its connections to the super-rationalism of genocide. [^]
[7] See e.g. Ned C. Landsman, "Introduction: The Context and Functions of Scottish Involvement with the Americas," in his Nation and Province in the First British Empire: Scotland and the Americas (Lewisberg PA: Bucknell University Press, 2001), 15-35. [^]
[8] See e.g. Thomas P. Miller, "Witherspoon, Blair, and the Rhetoric of Civic Humanism," in eds. Richard B. Sher and Jeffrey M. Smitten, Scotland and America in the Age of Enlightenment (Edinburgh: EUP, 1990), esp. 118-119; Alexander Broadie, The Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2001), 22; Murray G. H. Pittock, A New History of Scotland (Stroud: Sutton, 2003), 228-229. [^]
[9] Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (New York: Collier and Son, 1909), 416. [^]
[10] See David Hume ed. Knud Haakonssen, David Hume: Political Essays (Cambridge: CUP, 1994), 1-77; here I deliberately avoid the common apologia that since a constitution can be cobbled together from different types of written precedent, it therefore cannot be described as unwritten: the constitution is unwritten in any cogent form, and this vagueness has long been held to be its "traditional" strength by Gallophobic Britain. [^]
[11] Jacques Derrida, Otobiographies: l'enseignement de Nietzsche et la politique du nom propre (Paris: Editions Galilee, 1984). [^]
[12] In 1746 the Disarming act effectively illegalized sub-British expressions of national culture. [^]
[13] Here I use the stricter sense of "United Kingdom," which dates from 1603; this goes against a common but mistaken belief that the term, because of its current form which includes Northern Ireland, arose from Irish "union" with Britain. [^]
[14] Cf. Homi Bhabha, "DissemiNation: Time, narrative, and the margins of the modern nation," in Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 139-170. [^]
[15] The Glasgow Mechanics Magazine 1824, quoted in Geoffrey Batchen, "Guilty Pleasures," in eds. Levin, Frohne, and Weibel, CTRL [SPACE], 447-459: 447. [^]
[16] For a report on the CCTV cameras' installation and "effectiveness," see http://www.scotland.gov.uk/cru/resfinds/crf08-00.htm. [^]
[17] Robert Louis Stevenson, "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Other Stories, ed. Jenni Calder (London: Penguin, 1979), 27-97. [^]
[18] Cf. Michael Gardiner, The Cultural Roots of British Devolution (Edinburgh: EUP, 2004), chapter four. [^]
[19] John Macmurray, The Self as Agent (London: Faber and Faber, 1969), 39-60. [^]
[20] Macmurray, The Self as Agent, 105. [^]
[21] Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (London: Vintage, 1994). [^]
[22] Script Catherine Aherne, Craig Cash, and Henry Normal, dir. Mark Mylod, The Royle Family, three series, 14th Sept. 1998 - 25th Dec. 2000, BBC TV (BBC 1 and BBC 2). [^]
[23] Cf. Thomas Y. Levin, "Rhetoric of the Temporal Index: Surveillant Narration and the Cinema of 'Real Time'," in eds. Levin, Frohne, and Weibel, CTRL [SPACE], 578-593. [^]
[24] Adam Smith, Lectures On Rhetoric (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983 (1776)); see also a number of essays in ed. Robert Crawford, The Scottish Invention of English Literature (Cambridge: CUP, 1998). [^]
[25] Irvine Welsh, Marabou Stork Nightmares (London: Vintage, 1996), 22; "schemies" are people living in schemes, or council estates. [^]
[26] C.f. Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, trans. Vincent R. Carfagno (London: Souvenir, 1997 [1933]). [^]
[27] Welsh, Marabou Stork Nightmares, 27. [^]
[28] LC Technologies, "The Eyegaze Development System: A Tool For Eyetracking Applications," promotional booklet (Fairfax VA: LC Technologies, 2001), 1. [^]
[29] LC Technologies, "The Eyegaze Development System," 1. [^]
[30] See Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramaphone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 198-214. [^]
[31] LC Technologies, "The Eyegaze Development System," 2. [^]
[32] See e.g. various essays in Noam Chomsky, Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order (New York: Seven Stories, 1999). [^]
[33] Personal communication with Kuniaki Ozawa, most senior researcher on the Den no shin programme, 7th May 2003. I am grateful to Mr. Ozawa for his help. All translations from texts in Japanese are mine. [^]
[34] Kuniaki Ozawa, Kengo Andô, Wakako Hagiwara, and Shigeki Hirano,"Human Communication Support Approach for the Disabled and the Elderly," Hitachi Hyoron September 2001, 37-42, text in Japanese, title in English. [^]
[35] Personal communication with Kuniaki Ozawa, 7th May 2003. [^]
[36] See http://www.asahi.com/special/broadcast/TKY200312010111.html; in English, http://www.asahi.com/english/business/TKY200312020142.html. [^]
[37] Virilio, The Vision Machine, chapter five. [^]
[38] E.g. on the Gulf War see Jean Baudrillard, "The Reality Gulf," The Guardian 11th January 1991, and the withering discussion of this text in Christopher Norris, Uncritical Theory: Postmodernism, Intellectuals, and the Gulf War (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), 11-31. [^]
[39] E. Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan, Explorations in Communication (Boston: Beacon, 1960), introduction. [^]
[40] Paul Levinson, Digital McLuhan: A Guide to the Information Millenium (London: Routledge, 1999), 38, 70, 113. [^]
[41] Levinson, Digital McLuhan, 112. [^]
[42] Marshall McLuhan, "The Medium is the Message," excerpt from Understanding Media, in eds. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort, The New Media Reader (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2003), 203-209: 203. [^]
[43] Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon, 1969 [1957]), 215. [^]
[44] McLuhan, "The Medium is the Message," 208; cf. Michael Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1995), 195-228. [^]
[45] Cf. Edward Said, "Jane Austen and Empire," in Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994), 80-94. [^]